It was almost like old times as George Osborne announced a blizzard of small measures to boost the struggling British economy in his autumn statement. At one point, as he listed in full the bypasses and rail upgrades the government is planning to finance he sounded like a parody of Gordon Brown.

There were, however, three big differences with a Brown mini-budget. The first was that there was no rabbit pulled out of the hat at the climax of the speech. Osborne pre-announced all the upbeat parts of his speech – the extra money for youth unemployment, the mortgage guarantee scheme, the extra £5bn in infrastructure spending – to make sure they would not be lost when he downgraded Britain's forecasts.

The gloomy tone of the autumn statement was the second break with the Iron Chancellor. Brown was fortunate enough to preside over 10 years of uninterrupted growth in his time at the Treasury, getting out just before the sky fell in. Osborne's message was that growth would be weaker than he had been expecting this year, next year and the year after that, forcing him to borrow £113bn more than he had planned. What is more, the pain goes on and on.

The boom and bust in the economy has left more permanent damage than previously thought, requiring a continuation of spending cuts into the next parliament. Osborne will go into the election with plans that will involve an additional £15bn cut in spending.

Finally, whereas Brown's packages tended to favour poorer families over the rich, Osborne's measures were heavily regressive, taking money away from families on low incomes and public sector workers in order to fund tax breaks for small businesses and the construction firms that will benefit from the extra spending on the infrastructure. Indeed, the announcement of the additional squeeze on public sector pay seemed to be deliberately provocative on the eve of tomorrow's planned strike over pensions.